Reviewed by Jessie Bond
In a framed photograph reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c.1818), a man stands on a mountain path contemplating a thick blanket of clouds. While visually blocking the view, the physically permeable clouds allow – perhaps even invite – a descent to the realms below. This summons to enter, or at least contemplate another side, corresponds with the title of Emeric Lhuisset’s first solo exhibition in the UK, L’Autre Rive or ‘other side’. While the French phrase refers to the far bank or shore of a body of water, it can also be used as a reference to death. Through the meticulous arrangement of several bodies of work, the exhibition challenges over-simplified representations of conflict in the Middle East and the often-divisive imagery of the resulting European refugee crisis. As the title suggests, it also invites viewers to contemplate crossing borders, geographic or symbolic, and the resulting transformational effects.
Theater of War (2011-12) is a series of posed photographs made in Iraqi war zones, using Kurdish guerrilla fighters as models to emulate historic paintings of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. One of these images has been enlarged to the height of the room and pasted into a corner like a backdrop, or stage set, emphasising its theatricality. While this level of artifice seems antithetical to traditional ideas of spontaneous or candid war photography, Lhuisset’s images surface a long visual history of archetypal poses through which these images often gain their affective power.
Displayed over this backdrop is Passage (2012) a short looping video of a clandestine crossing of the border between Syria and Turkey. The jolting handheld footage contrasts and disrupts the composed stillness of the photograph. It captures the almost indistinguishable moment a person formerly deemed a hero for fighting ISIS is transformed into a refugee, an identity typically portrayed through tropes that evoke fear or pity rather than admiration or gratitude. In the exhibition, it also serves as a bridge to a carefully choreographed room of images taken from L’Autre Rive (2011-17), a body of work that counters these tropes by highlighting the ordinariness rather than difference of refugees.
The mundane – a cat, a bookshelf, a pair of feet in socks and sliders – meets the symbolic – a map of Syria, an empty road, a view of the Mediterranean where many refuges have lost their lives. Rendered as cyanotypes, these disparate images form an aesthetically rich whole, the monochrome tones elevating them beyond their digital origins. Two of these images are displayed as diptychs, accompanied by a cyanotype of the same image that has been left unfixed to continue developing until almost entirely blue.These enigmatic, almost blank images evoke the treacherous waters crossed, or the colour of the EU flag. The disappearing images also mirror the erasure of narratives surrounding past contributions of migrants to the EU, an amnesia which supports hostility to immigrants and refugees. But, most powerfully, the images that have faded also create a poignant absence; a silent void that evokes the ultimate crossing to the other side.
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Emeric Lhuisset, L’Autre Rive is currently exhibited at TJ Boulting, London, until 22 May 2021
Reviewed for Photomonitor by Jessie Bond
